The Word of the Year Is…Just 3 Letters Long

What better way to kick off the season of year-end lists than with the announcement of the word of the year by a team of lexicographers, editors and marketing experts at Oxford American Dictionary? From a list of eight trendy, culturally relevant words such as “superstorm,” “super PAC,” and “Higgs boson,” the OAD named “GIF” its word of the year.

Pronounced “jif,” a GIF (short for Graphics Interchange Format) is a compressed file format for images that creates a simple, looping image. GIFs have been around for more than two decades, but “like so many other relics from the ’80s, the GIF has never been trendier,” says Katherine Martin, Head of the US Dictionaries Program at Oxford University Press USA.

I recently wrote about an app that creates GIFs, and here’s one of my new favorite GIF sites.